1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of printing systems and, in particular, to printing banner pages between print jobs.
2. Statement of the Problem
A banner page, also referred to as a separator page, is used to separate print jobs from one another after the jobs are printed. For example, when multiple print jobs are printed on a shared printer, a banner page is printed before the sheets of each print job to act as a partition between individual print jobs. A common banner page includes the user name of the person originating the print job, the name of the print job, and the date and time the job was printed. The banner page makes it clear who printed each print job so that the print jobs may be separated and delivered to the proper originators.
The banner pages are presently generated by an application running on a host system that originates the print job, or by a print driver installed between the host and the printer. The banner pages may also be generated by the printer itself. However, when the printer generates the banner pages, the printer simply fills pre-defined fields in a template with data from the print job, such as the name of the print job, a user name, and a date/time. Thus, the content of the banner pages is limited to data included in the print job.